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Video spotlight: Above Iliamna
Alaska's Bristol Bay is home to the most important run of sockeye salmon on earth—about half of all commercially harvested sockeye come from this run, and they provide about 14,000 American jobs every single year. This fishery, as we've noted for well over a decade, is priceless. Yet the threat of Pebble Mine looms like…
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Video spotlight: Chalk
The origin of modern-day fly fishing can be likely be traced to the fabled chalk streams of Britain—those clear, cold spring creeks where the art of presenting the upstream dry fly was pioneered. Rivers like the Test come to mind when I think of chalk streams, but the video below gives me a bit of…
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Voices from the River: The plight of California salmon
By Sam Davidson I came across a video recently, on sockeye salmon migrating to the spawn in the Lake Iliamna area in Alaska. The productivity of this region for salmon is nothing short of amazing—and makes the proposed Pebble Mine, looming like the guillotine over the entire Bristol Bay ecosystem, that much more troubling. Watching…
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Video spotlight: Once You Pop, You Can’t Stop
Who doesn't like catching fish on top? With poppers, no less. Several years back, while fishing with a great group of guys on Alaska's Tongass National Forest, I was introduced to the fact that pink salmon—yes, pink salmon—will hit poppers just as they're reporting for spawning duty from the saltwater. We spent one glorious afternoon…
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Fly tying: Whip finishing by hand
About a decade ago, while sitting at a table in the dining room at what is now Calder Mountain Lodge on the northern, roadless tip of Prince of Wales Island, I busied myself tying up a few bright orange streamers for the next day's fishing for Dolly Varden in the island's tannin-stained salmon streams. An…
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Beavers: Friend or foe?
What happened to my favorite little trout creek? It's now a series of trout ponds! And most of this happened since last year! Most of you TUers know we've covered the issue of beavers in Trout magazine. In short, beavers can be extremely damaging to trout habitat in some places (like Wisconsin, where removal of…
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Angler science: Help solve the mystery of Didymo
By Matt Barney A new Angler Science project from Trout Unlimited aims to mobilize our members to contribute their field observations and help scientists understand an organism that can dramatically impact trout waters. Didymo, more colorfully known as rock snot, has been labeled an invasive species in the past, and many anglers associate it with…
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